But these results are nothing compared to Davies’s biggest discovery: inspired by the connection he made between Irish and Sikh put-downs, he started tracking similar examples of humor around the world—and uncovered a universal joke. He’s named this the stupidity joke, the sort of barbed zinger that makes fun of outsiders, simpletons, and others on the fringes of society. In America, the obvious version is the Polish joke, but that’s just the tip of the mean-spirited iceberg. Take the Philogelos, the oldest-known joke book in the world. Of the 265 zingers in the ancient Greek tome, nearly a quarter concern folks from cities renowned for their idiocy, like Cyme in modern-day Turkey and Abdera in Thrace. Later, in medieval England, cracks about the dunces who lived in the village of Gotham were all the rage. (New York’s nickname, “Gotham,” doesn’t sound so impressive once you learn that author Washington Irving coined it to suggest the place was a city of fools.)
The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny
Peter McGrawm Joel Warner
Gotham – first used by Washington Irving in his satirical periodical Salmagundi in November 1807 as an allusion to the tale of the Wise Men of Gotham, and made popular as Gotham City, the location of Batman comics, first specified in December 1940’s Batman #4, written by Bill Finger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicknames_of_New_York_City
The village is most famed for the stories of the “Wise Men of Gotham”. These depict the people of the village as being stupid. However, the reason for the behaviour is believed to be that the villagers wished to feign madness to avoid a Royal Highway being built through the village, as they would then be expected to build and maintain this route. Madness was believed at the time to be highly contagious, and when King John’s knights saw the villagers behaving as if insane, the knights swiftly withdrew and the King’s road was re-routed to avoid the village.